Not long after posting my 3 months of dedicated bike coaching post did my week of outdoor rides become slightly derailed...
After the weekend of riding and racing I noticed a bit of pain in my right hamstring tendon on the inside of my knee. Having experienced a few tendon injuries in different places over the years, I decided to embrace my usual rest day on Monday with as much rigour as a training day. Feet up most of the day, icing, compression and some anti-inflammatory tablets.
Upon waking on Tuesday morning things felt much improved, but I didn't want to push things too much. Instead of my planned 4 hour ride with a few efforts in the last hour, I elected for just a couple of hours of zone 2 with a nice cafe stop.
Although I was *aware* of the tendon on the ride, it certainly wasn't causing any pain (a minor discomfort at worst) and didn't seem any worse at high power output. After finishing the ride things felt pretty good, but I went through the same recovery protocol as the rest day and continued the R.I.C.E treatment.
Come Wednesday morning I was hopeful of being able to complete my planned 3 hours with some tempo intervals. However, the tendon pain was still somewhat present. I deliberated for a while, but decided to have a day off the bike and just get a decent core and upper body strength session in instead (I generally complete a couple of these a week to supplement the on-bike training).
It's certainly a shame that my plans for a lot of outdoor training on my week off work have been a bit disrupted in this way (I've been looking forward to this week for some time now!), however, I know caution is required with these niggles to prevent them turning into something worse.
I'll see how things feel over the next couple of days, with the hope of getting back on the bike by the end of the week at least.
Takeaway: Sometimes things don't quite turn out as expected. As Mike Tyson said "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"!. On the plus side, it's given me a bit of time to get this blog going and develop a plan for future training content creation.
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